Ripple Continues Goodwill Flex with $50 Million Academic Initiative

San Francisco’s most well known crypto startup Ripple has declared the launch of a new blockchain research enterprise, the University Blockchain Research Initiative (UBRI), to stimulate academic research within the cryptoverse. To start, Ripple has pumped $50 million USD into the initiative, which so far consists of 17 elite universities from across the globe.

The primary focus of the UBRI will be to groom university students on topics of the blockchain, cryptocurrency, and fintech. Focusing on the bigger picture, the initiative could help minimize the current global shortfall of blockchain experts in the crypto ecosystem.

“We’re excited to announce the University Blockchain Research Initiative (UBRI), a collaboration with top universities around the world to support and accelerate academic research, technical development and innovation in the blockchain, cryptocurrency and digital payments.”

To start, Ripple will provide $50 million — in cash, not XRP — along with experts and technical resources to partnering universities. These universities are spread all over the world, including the following institutions:

Australia – Australian National University College of the Law

Asia – Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, and Korea University

North America – Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, University of Pennsylvania, University of California, Berkeley, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Oregon, and the University of Waterloo

South America – Fundação Getulio Vargas

Europe – Delft University of Technology, University College London, University of Luxembourg, and University of Nicosia

Shaping the Future While Addressing Present Concerns

As per the announcement, partnering universities will have free reign to choose their research focuses independently, building tailored curriculums for their students. The aim is to foster high student demand for exploring distributed ledger technology.

The company blog stated:

“From new business use cases — such as making cross-border payments faster, lower cost and more transparent — to uses of blockchain for good, students and faculty globally are emerging as major contributors to the creation of a more robust and valuable blockchain and payments ecosystem.”

“I have every confidence that major banks will use XRapid as a liquidity tool this calendar year. You know, by the end of next year I would certainly hope that we would see you know in the order of magnitude dozens. But, you know, we also need to continue to grow that eco-system, grow the liquidity, and it all comes back to if we’re solving a real problem for real customers.”

Is there need to launch more initiatives as such the UBRI? Share your views in the comments section.

About Akshay Makadiya

Akshay is a founder of RankLane, a Digital Marketing Agency. Being an SEO consultant he loves to write and speak on Digital Marketing, Cryptocurrency and Latest Technologies. Hit him up on Twitter @axymak for a quick chat.